Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T12:36:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 2269580 bytes, checksum: 6a6f30367d0a1aa2a50f7c1c09973b1f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-08-24 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / In the area of Microelectronics, one of the most difficult it is to find qualified professionals. For the training of these there is a demand for resources - human and material - which most of the time have high cost. Thus, a solution is needed as accessible to institutions and researchers, as adaptable to your needs, providing scalability and dissemination to training, without focusing on quality. From the literature, based and presenting the Ptolemy framework, developed in Java and that allows the simulation of concurrent and heterogeneous systems, and in the Actor Model were directed efforts for the development of a tool for code generation open-source and multiplatform. Thus, the aim of this work is to develop a tool to generate VHDL code based on Ptolemy Actors using the Ptolemy framework. Where, in addition to design and simulate graphically there is a difference in the possibility of modeling at different levels of abstraction and generation of the VHDL code in a hierarchical manner, presenting the process of development of the tool and the results of its use, as well as contributions. / Na área de Microeletrônica uma das maiores dificuldades trata-se de encontrar profissionais capacitados. Para a formação destes há uma demanda por recursos humanos e materiais - que, muitas vezes, tem alto custo. Assim, se faz necessária uma solução tão acessível a instituições e pesquisadores, quanto adaptável às suas necessidades, propiciando escalabilidade e disseminação à formação, sem deixar de focar a qualidade. A partir do levantamento bibliográfico, baseando-se e apresentando o framework Ptolemy, desenvolvido em Java e que possibilita a simulação de sistemas concorrentes e heterogêneos, e no modelo de atores foram direcionados os esforços para o desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta de geração de código open-source e multiplataforma. Sendo assim, o objetivo deste trabalho é o desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta de geração de código VHDL baseada em Atores utilizando o Framework Ptolemy. Onde, além de projetar e simular graficamente há um diferencial na possibilidade de modelagem em níveis diferentes de abstração e geração de código VHDL de forma hierárquica. Apresentado o processo de desenvolvimento da ferramenta e resultados de sua utilização, bem como as contribuições.

This work aims to offer a new methodological approach to intellectual exchange in the medieval Mediterranean. In the absence of abundant textual evidence, this work explores the transmission of scientific knowledge from Greek and Arabic into Latin during the eleventh and twelfth centuries through direct textual translation as well as unwritten, typically material, exchanges. It approaches the so-called twelfth-century translation movement of Greek and Arabic science into Latin in three parts, which each touch on a different branch of medieval science that was transmitted into Latin through medieval Sicily. The first part examines paratextual diagrams in medieval manuscripts of the Classical work on mathematics and astronomy, Ptolemy’s Almagest. Working across Latin, Arabic, and Greek, it traces a different route for the transmission of the mathematical diagrams than for the translation of the text itself. In the second part, it moves away from direct translation, turning to the production of Latin pharmaceutical manuals that lack a direct antecedent in another language. For one of these, Circa instans of Matthaeus Platearius, it first considers on both a holistic and granular scale how the Latin text drew on influences in Greek and Arabic that would have been available in Sicily in the twelfth century. This comparison suggests that some information about pharmacology was transmitted orally or experientially. The next section compares the individual substances included in Circa Instans to Latin and Judaeo-Arabic trade records for Sicily during that period, in order to determine whether and how information about these goods as medicines could have moved through trade, which otherwise considered them to be supplemental materials for the textile industry. T he third part is focused on copper, one of the materials mentioned in both pharmaceutical manuals and trade records, which also has a significant presence in extant objects from Norman Sicily. By systematically surveying these extant objects, as well as the treatment of copper in alchemical manuals from the period, this work considers the different information that was conveyed through the material presentation of copper than through its treatment in alchemical treatises. In these analyses, this work demonstrates that a study of medieval science can benefit from: considering a broad range of sources, both in language and medium; navigating carefully through assertions of what the knowledge being transmitted constituted; and reevaluating assumptions about the role that textual translation played in transmitting knowledge of science.

Almost two thousand years ago, Claudius Ptolemy created a guide to drawing maps of the world, identifying the names and coordinates of over 8,000 settlements and geographical features. Using the coordinates of those cities and landmarks which have been identified with modern locations, a series of best-fit transformations has been applied to several of Ptolemy’s regional maps, those of Britain, Spain, and Italy. The transformations relate Ptolemy’s coordinates to their modern equivalents by rotation and skewed scaling. These reflect the types of error that appear in Ptolemy’s data, namely those of distance and orientation. The mathematical techniques involved in this process are all modern. However, these techniques have been altered in order to deal with the historical difficulties of Ptolemy’s maps. To think of Ptolemy’s data as similar to that collected from a modern random sampling of a population and to apply unbiased statistical methods to it would be erroneous. Ptolemy’s data is biased, and the nature of that bias is going to be informed by the history of the data. Using such methods as cluster analysis, Procrustes analysis, and multidimensional scaling, we aimed to assess numerically the accuracy of Ptolemy’s maps. We also investigated the nature of the errors in the data and whether or not these could be linked to historical developments in the areas mapped.

Claudius Ptolemy composed his Geography in the city of Alexandria, one of the most prominent intellectual centres of the Roman Empire. His work offers a comprehensive description of the known world as well as insight into the practice of scholarly geography during the second century CE. Ptolemy’s most important innovation in this field was his use of geographical coordinates to create maps of the world, and his catalogue, with its latitudes and longitudes of thousands of localities, is one of our most valuable sources on the antique oikoumenē. Very little is known, however, about the sources and working methods that Ptolemy employed to produce his Geography. This book focuses on Ptolemy’s description of the Iberian peninsula and examines two problematic and interlinked topics relating to the origins of the catalogue of localities: Ptolemy’s sources and scientific methods on the one hand, and the textual transmission of the Geography, from Ptolemy to the extant manuscripts, on the other.

Astrology is a science which has had an uncertain status throughout its history, from its beginnings in Greco-Roman Antiquity to the medieval Islamic world and Christian Europe which led to frequent debates about its validity and what kind of a place it should have, if any, in various cultures. Written in the second century A.D., Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos is not the earliest surviving text on astrology. However, the complex defense given in the Tetrabiblos will be treated as an important starting point because it changed the way astrology would be justified in Christian and Muslim works and the influence Ptolemy’s presentation had on later works represents a continuation of the method introduced in the Tetrabiblos. Abū Ma‘shar’s Kitāb al-Madkhal al-kabīr ilā ‘ilm akām al-nujūm, written in the ninth century, was the most thorough surviving defense from the Islamic world. Roger Bacon’s Opus maius, although not focused solely on advocating astrology, nevertheless, does contain a significant defense which has definite links to the works of both Abū Ma‘shar and Ptolemy. As such, he demonstrates another stage in the development of astrology. These three works together reveal the threads of a trend of a rationalized astrology separated from its mythical origins which began with Ptolemy and survived through both medieval Islam and medieval Europe. In the two examples of defending astrology I have used, Abū Ma‘shar and Roger Bacon, Ptolemy’s influence can be seen to have persisted from the second century through to the thirteenth, and the nature of the differences in their defenses illustrates the continuation and evolution of the tradition of defending astrology.

Early Ptolemaic Alexandria provides a unique perspective on cultural interactions during the Hellenistic Period. With this idea in mind, I have tracked the cultural affiliation of the city from its foundation through the early years of the Ptolemaic dynasty. In order to do this, both literary and archaeological evidence, including various foundation myths for the city, the poetry of Theocritus and Herodas, papyrological evidence as well as the city plan and archaeological remains of the Serapeum, were analyzed. Using this evidence, this thesis attempts to describe the cultural state of the ancient city and the surrounding area in its early years, and tracks its development from an entirely Greek cultural background to a multicultural one.

The appliance area of the computer technologies involves more and more living spheres because of its rapid development. Nowadays smart devices are integrated in the domestic electric appliances. For decades, technologists have been promising the ‘intelligent house’. The vision is usually portrayed as a house filled with technology which will do the dweller’s bidding and take all domestic drudgery out of their lives. Availability of faster, smaller and ever cheaper computing equipment and a variety of wired and wireless network technologies are enabling technologies that bring this vision closer to reality. These technology trends lead to the concept that computing and other ‘smart’ devices will become pervasive, fully networked and ‘disappear’ into the infrastructure of the home. There is no unified standard methodology to describe interface of interconnection between other devices in creation of new home devices. In such cases only one device is evaluated independent of entire system, therefore compatibility problem occurs. Seeking to avoid these mentioned problems, it is necessary to have simulation of home devices methodology. This methodology enables to simplify developers work and to evaluate interconnection between devices.

Astrology is a science which has had an uncertain status throughout its history, from its beginnings in Greco-Roman Antiquity to the medieval Islamic world and Christian Europe which led to frequent debates about its validity and what kind of a place it should have, if any, in various cultures. Written in the second century A.D., Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos is not the earliest surviving text on astrology. However, the complex defense given in the Tetrabiblos will be treated as an important starting point because it changed the way astrology would be justified in Christian and Muslim works and the influence Ptolemy’s presentation had on later works represents a continuation of the method introduced in the Tetrabiblos. Abū Ma‘shar’s Kitāb al-Madkhal al-kabīr ilā ‘ilm akām al-nujūm, written in the ninth century, was the most thorough surviving defense from the Islamic world. Roger Bacon’s Opus maius, although not focused solely on advocating astrology, nevertheless, does contain a significant defense which has definite links to the works of both Abū Ma‘shar and Ptolemy. As such, he demonstrates another stage in the development of astrology. These three works together reveal the threads of a trend of a rationalized astrology separated from its mythical origins which began with Ptolemy and survived through both medieval Islam and medieval Europe. In the two examples of defending astrology I have used, Abū Ma‘shar and Roger Bacon, Ptolemy’s influence can be seen to have persisted from the second century through to the thirteenth, and the nature of the differences in their defenses illustrates the continuation and evolution of the tradition of defending astrology.

Synchronous Dataflow (SDF) graphs are a convenient way to represent many signal processing and dataflow operations. Nodes within SDF graphs represent computation while arcs represent dependencies between nodes. Using a graph representation, SDF graphs formally specify a dataflow algorithm without any assumptions on the final implementation. This allows an SDF model to be synthesized into a variety of implementation techniques including both software and hardware. This thesis presents a technique for generating an abstract hardware representation from SDF models. The techniques presented here operate on SDF models defined structurally within the Ptolemy modeling environment. The behavior of the nodes within Ptolemy SDF models is specified in software and can be simple, such as a single arithmetic operation, or arbitrarily complex. This thesis presents a technique for extracting the behavior of a limited class of SDF nodes defined in software and generating a structural description of the SDF model based on primitive arithmetic and logical operations. This synthesized graph can be used for subsequent hardware synthesis transformations.

When designing custom hardware to implement signal processing algorithms, it is important to select bitwidths that meet the minimum error requirements while minimizing implementation area. Larger bitwidths reduce error, but increase area, while selecting smaller bitwidths does the opposite. Finding the set of bitwidths that produces the smallest area that still meets the error requirements has been shown to be NP-hard. To address this problem, many heuristics have been developed. Unfortunately, they are not always well documented and do not have available source code. It is also di cult to know which algorithm to try to use. This thesis addresses these challenges in several ways. It provides the necessary background information to understand bitwidth optimization algorithms, as well as a survey of the existing literature. It also presents a new framework called Bitwidth Analysis Tool (BAT) built on the open source Ptolemy tool. This framework is designed to help implement and compare bitwidth optimization algorithms. Some existing algorithms are implemented within this new framework, and compared with each other on a variety of benchmarks. The comparison results verify that because the tested algorithms are heuristics, no single algorithm gives the best results in all cases. It is therefore important to test a variety of algorithms to try to find the best answer. The results also show existing algorithms and error models provide a good starting point, but existing error models do not yet provide sufficiently tight bounds to be useful in large complex systems.